While most of us associate Amazon with Kindles and online shopping (and now drones?), the company is also a major player in the cloud services industry, an effort that got a boost this week with new services and expansion plans.

Amazon Kinesis, first unveiled in November as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now live for all users, providing a managed service for real-time processing of streaming data.

Kinesis does the heavy lifting when it comes to number crunching, collecting and processing hundreds of terabytes of data per hour from hundreds of thousands of sources. This allows customer "to easily write applications that process information in real-time, from sources such as website click-streams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation and social media, and operational logs and metering data," Amazon said.

"When we set out to build Amazon Kinesis, we wanted to eliminate the cost, effort, and expertise barriers that have prevented our customers from processing streaming data in real-time," Terry Hanold, vice president of AWS Cloud Commerce, said in a statement.

Customers pay for what they use. "You can get started by provisioning low throughput streams, and only pay a low hourly rate for the throughput you need," Amazon said.

The popular e-tailer, meanwhile, is expanding AWS reach into China, where a select group of local companies will be invited to begin using the cloud computing platform in early 2014. The limited program is intended for China-based and multinational organizations with customers in the Asian country.

AWS is partnering with various Chinese providers, including ChinaNetCenter and SINNET, which will provide infrastructure, bandwidth, and network capabilities.

"China represents an important long-term market segment for AWS," Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, said in a statement. "We are looking forward to working with Chinese customers, partners, and government institutions to help small and large organizations use cloud computing to innovate and deploy faster, save money, expand their geographic reach, and do so without sacrificing security, availability, data durability, and reliability."

Thousands of customers in China already use AWS  many of whom will also participate in the limited preview of the AWS China Region.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in journalism and mass communications.
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